James Thomson, who wrote under the pseudonym Bysshe Vanolis, was a Scottish Victorian era poet famous primarily for the long poem ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, first published in 1874, an expression of bleak pessimism in a dehumanized, uncaring urban environment.
He struggled with depression, insomnia and alcohol-abuse throughout his short life and his work frequently reflected the bleakness and despair of his life’s experiences.
Raymond Williams calls ‘The City of Dreadful Night’: ‘a symbolic vision of the city as a condition of human life’. Williams asserts that, by the Victorian-era, the city had become a new form of human consciousness. The city of Thomson’s poem is clearly an imagined London. But it is not the dynamic hub of Empire of the popular imagination: for him it is a city of death in life. A place permeated by loss of belief, loss of purpose and loss of hope.
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